cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40568658

I recently came across three separate platforms:

Qortal: https://qortal.org/

ZeroNet: https://zeronet.io/

and

Plebbit: https://plebbit.com/

That all claim to be completely decentralized.

There’s even talk about how Plebbit is more decentralized than the Fediverse, because the Fediverse is based off of instances.

https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/s/0ynXzrD5H6

And I was curious, would such a setup work better for the Fediverse, or is it basically just a huge scam/waste of time and money?

  • Sean Tilley@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    13 hours ago

    Nope! The main thing going for a distributed ledger would be global consistency, but there are some very negative downsides. It’s slow, scales poorly, puts a massive burden on admins operating instances, and the blocks would be effectively immutable…meaning that if the contents of each activity were fully nested inside of a block, edits or deletions would be impossible. We already see problems with CSAM showing up in various blockchains, and a Fediverse blockchain used for social purposes would be no different.

    It’s just not the right tool for the job when it comes to social networks. There were a few early experiments in this area, such as Twister, which tried to build a Twitter clone on top of a blockchain using DHT. It has a huge list of limitations, though, and development stopped around 2020.